What is with readers whose usernames start with the letters De and interacting with the comic in the coolest ways? First Dellis becomes the first of us to communicate with a character, then DefinitelyNotAnUmbrella becomes the first of us to try to influence the plot. Next came DeepDark, who managed to become one of the most mysterious and interesting characters in Unichat despite not actually being a character in Unichat. And now we have ((Delta)), who seems ready to challenge DeepDark's title with the post he left on page 99. A coded message sent to Unum_Relicuum, seemingly an offer of cooperation, which also contained references to an "Esoteric Blind Order" and its mysterious other members, "The Templar" and "The Inquisitor".

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS SPOILERS NOT ONLY FOR THE SOLUTION TO THE PUZZLE, BUT ALSO POTENTIALLY FOR MUCH OF THE OVERARCHING PLOT. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.

Spoiler:

Decoding the message gives us "That is not dead which can eternal lie", the first half of a poem associated with the Necronomicon from H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. (The second half is "And with strange aeons even death may die".) Spooky. But what does it mean? Well, it feels a bit weird to speculate about the meaning of a message left by another reader, especially one who's also on the forum, but I'm going to try anyway. Delta, feel free to laugh at me if I mess it up.

First of all, notice who the recipient of the message was: Unum_Relicuum, a (seemingly very high-ranking) member of the cult of Gaia. Delta also seems to be a cultist of some description (all the terminology related to the Esoteric Blind Order is rather culty-sounding, and Delta even describes himself as a "shy cult dude" on his ComicFury profile page.) So what we have here is one cultist contacting another, with the claim that the two share many ideological similarities, and their similarities may not end there. This seems to imply that the EBO and Gaia have a lot in common, perhaps to the point of being different interpretations of the same concept.

Now, remember that Gaians believe that Gaia is the universe, and that it is dying. In light of this, the quoted poem's associations with undeath and immortality are particularly interesting. What's even more fascinating is the comparison that seems to be being made between Gaia and the deities of the Cthulhu mythos. If there really is any similarity between the two, then Gaia just got even more sinister.

What lends credence to this idea, in my opinion, is the fact that this isn't the first time the Cthulhu mythos has been referenced in Unichat. For one thing, OITHEOI says "for the love of Cthulhu" in the same way others might say "for the love of God" on page 24, and as anyone who's witnessed Theo's roast of me knows, he's a guy who seems to have a pretty good understanding of the, ahem, D~I~V~I~N~E S~E~C~R~E~T~S of this universe, particularly those relating to Rasputin's shatterpoint majyyks. And Rasputin, as we know, has some pretty powerful Gaian connections. Furthermore, the quantum perturbation detecting program that Sonja sends to EP is called the "cthulhu scanner", and the conversation that prompted her to create it centres around the pair's feeling that, to quote Sonja, "there is something out there, and [...] its interests don't exactly line up with ours". Perhaps I'm over-thinking it, but it really seems to me that these characters find something Lovecraftian about the weirdness of their universe. And it would seem that Delta does too.

My hypothesis: it's all connected. Whatever's attacking Alex, the superpowers Rasputin and the other chessmasters have displayed (yes I am still calling them superpowers), Etamnanki, Gaia. I think they're all connected in terrifying ways the human mind can not even begin to comprehend. Sounds pretty Lovecraftian, doesn't it?